Heat valve dysfunction can lead to heart failure and death, and surgery is the standard treatment. Valve repair surgery is performed under cardiopulmonary bypass making it difficult for the surgeon to know if a surgical modification will be effective when blood flow is restored. A surgical planning system has been proposed to improve surgical outcomes by allowing a surgeon to explore valve repair strategies on a computer model of a patient’s valve (1). Many groups have published computational models of heart valves based on the finite element (FE) method, but they are prohibitively slow for simulating valve mechanics in an interactive setting. Mass-spring (MS) networks have been used as an alternative to FE methods for modeling deformable bodies, trading off accuracy for speed.

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